The Unplanned in 2025

I’m typing this message to you on the morning of January 1st, with my thumb. A baby is asleep in my left arm and I’d like him to stay that way a little longer. Another baby is starfished out on her new playmat, also asleep for the time being. A Beethoven trio dulls the potentially wakening noise of Opa putting outdoor decorations away.

If the dawn of 2025 finds me, in one sense, nap-trapped into a sedentary peace of my own creation, it also has me racing toward a blindingly bright light at the end of a postpartum tunnel. And when I call the light blinding, I mean that I have no clue what’s up there. I haven’t thought or planned beyond January 3. Oops.

I usually do a lot of thinking and planning around a new year. “Goalsetting,” I’d call it, more than “resolution making.” But then I again, I am also pretty religious about staying up until midnight to greet the new year, even if I’m doing it alone. Last night I went to bed at 10:45.

In any case, the past couple of weeks has made a mockery of the art of planning — and for reasons that have little to do with twin newborns. A bug (likely norovirus) crept slowly through the extended Flaxbart family, who had converged on Santa Fe with the express purpose of spending Christmas together. I’d envisioned passing the babies around a circle of adoring family members as the smell of my dad’s cooking wafted out from the kitchen and past the Christmas tree to the cozy living room. Instead, my dad among the afflicted on the 25th, I spent most of Christmas Day caring for two babies by myself, picking at snacks from the party table that had been set before dad grew queasy, unsure of what other food there was in the house.

In the same fit of panic that has hit me most days since the clocks fell back, I decided at about 4:15 that we had to get out of the house before sundown, even if just for a few minutes. I wasn’t trying to save Christmas — I was trying to save my sanity. I rushed to change and warmly dress the twins, raced to buckle them into their car seats, and grabbed the keys to my dad’s Subaru. It wasn’t until I opened the garage door that I noticed: it was snowing.

Now I was excited. Suddenly my dumb little outing actually did have Christmas-saving potential. Babies’ first snow! A white Christmas despite record low precipitation numbers for a New Mexico December! By the time I drove down the hill to a nearby park, the light flurry had become something heavier. In a dash I had the Snap n Go stroller unfolded. Groggy but awake, the babies looked confused as the wind whipped cold flakes into their tiny but luxurious eyelashes. I walked them most of the way across a foorbridge before thinking better of it and turning back. The canopies of their car seats were getting damp and the sun was setting.

Back in the car, I drove up the hill to my dad’s place, then past it. Santa Fe in the snow was too gorgeous to stop ogling just yet. I turned around and once again drove past the turnoff for my dad’s. The snow still fell, but the storm was passing. I’d go around the block. Or no, I’d head past the old courthouse. While I was at it, I might as well go around the Plaza. The ultra-low sun was ducking under the snowclouds now and bathing the old city in a rich gold light. Still, the snow fell.

I couldn’t have planned it. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have planned it. But those 20 minutes absolutely saved my lonely Christmas Day.

We got to have lots of baby-passing and family time on other days of the visit. My dad cooked great food. Cocktails and party snacks got served. Lots of plans were made, almost all of them fell through, and it was still a Christmastide I’ll never forget.

And now here I am, hurtling ever closer to that blinding future of whoever I will be as a working mom of ever-growing infants. I won’t lie to you: a plan will definitely be made. But I think I’ll start by resolving to regularly recall my sunset drive on Christmas Day, and let it remind me that, when best-laid plans fall through, the magic of the unplannable could be unfolding behind the nearest door.